Day 222 - Do Not Think Too Highly Of Yourself - A Vision of Righteousness

A sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN, July 21, 2013

OT scripture: Habukkuk 2:2-4NT scripture: Romans 12:1-21

In today’s sermon, we will hear what Paul has to say about righteousness at the level of congregation. In the following sermon we will hear what it means on a corporate or political level, and in the third sermon what it means on a social, or interpersonal level.

For these three sermons to make sense, in fact  for Paul to make sense, we must understand Paul's sense of righteousness. Paul has spent the previous 11 chapters talking about a new reality of God’s righteousness, Jesus Christ holding the idea of righteousness and faith described in Habukkuk 2:2-4 ever present in the back of his mind.  Christ is The Righteous One who is a model of goodness; the life of Jesus defines righteousness. God reckoned Abraham righteous by his faith before there was the Law, so too God reckons us righteous through Jesus Christ, regardless of sin. Reckon is judicial language. It means that before a accusation of wrongdoing is even leveled against you, you are reckoned not guilty by the judge. There is no trial or indictment.  This is the the basis of the idea, “saved only by the grace of God," not by works.  Remember, we do not earn righteous it is reckoned - though we may resist it.

Paul says also righteousness is not a call to self-denial in reaction to our sinful nature. Our baptism though the resurrection of Jesus has washed all that guilt away. I think we sometimes over read guilt into salvation as self-denial or self-punishment. There is no room for self-denial because righteousness is a reckoned call to service of the Lord, to self-giving as a consequence of our new life. This is true whether we talk about the person or the congregation. In both cases we are talking about the body of Christ. The body is the place where God’s righteousness is worked out in the world. That can happen only by the total rebirth or transformation into the likeness of Christ. This does not mean just being humble (though it is involved) or perfect (we cannot be so) or that Christians are superior to others. It means we affirm the equality of all God’s children through his grace.

Righteousness has two parts, the model and the practice. I call the model the vertical part. That is grace, our relationship to God’s righteousness, Jesus Christ is the paradigm. I call practice the horizontal part. That part is service or active obedience. It is our relationship to the world in response to grace.

I said that righteousness causes a total change or rebirth symbolized by baptism in which we are transformed into the likeness of Christ. That gives us (and Paul) opportunity to brag but not to think we are superior as Christians because we can only brag about what we cannot control - God’s graciousness that inspires an active faith that might entail suffering. An active faith means we affirm God’s grace and righteousness, not by giving lip service, but living to defend, or demonstrate the equality of all God’s children by our own action. In spite of our common summary presumption that Paul preaches justification only by faith and not works, this whole passage in Romans describes the work of the active faith of a righteous person. Righteousness is active obedience.

Paul’s sense of being reckoned righteous empowered him confidently to affirm his equality with the Apostles. Consider what Paul said in Galatians about his history before he set his first foot in the Mediterranean ministry. Here is a brief excerpt:

 ^1:11“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; ¹²for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ… ¹⁸Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days;… ^2:1Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem… ⁶And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me. ⁷On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised…⁹(and) the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. ¹⁰They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.”

Paul did not claim superiority but equality.  He defended his obligation to carry the Gospel to the gentiles according to the revelation he experienced. Clearly this passage shows he retained and redirected the zeal he exhibited as a Pharisee pursuing Christians to proclaim the Gospel. You can tell Paul was a Christian zealot.

Paul said he was called to this Apostolic zeal by a revelation. Except for this passage, we know absolutely nothing about specific accomplishments of Paul in his first 14 years while he labored in Syria and Arabia. Were there miracles?  Did he bring hundreds into the fold? We only can conclude whatever work he accomplished with God’s help, his righteousness impressed the Apostles enough to affirm his revelation and consent to his ministry to the gentiles.

What does Paul say is righteousness’ claim on us?  Every Christian who (must) affirm the equality and importance of every other Christian and welcomes them reflects that righteousness.  Paul intentionally uses ambiguous language about the body. By “every Christian,” he means both each person and the congregation as a body with many members. “Every Christian” is each one of us in the room and us as a collective whole of all congregations.  Paul says (in 12:2) we (both people and the several congregations) have different gifts but he says first we ALL share a common righteous obligation, “do not be conformed to the world but (be) transformed by our rebirth that we may know what is good and acceptable and perfect in God’s eyes and do it.”

Only when we all bring our own particular strengths to the power of the congregation can it fulfill the obligation to proclaim the Good News. To do this depends clearly on the behavior of each person and the congregation. He really shines the light on righteousness in the next verses: “let your love be genuine, hate what is evil; hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection so that you compete with one another to shower this honor on the other.” And then 12:11 really turns up the heat: “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.”

Paul is thinking, “do I have to repeat myself?” We cannot be of the world and zealously fulfill our obligation if we are transformed by grace.

These next verses, 12:14-21, convince me that in those first fourteen years he spent in Arabia, Syria, and Antioch he learned much of the oral tradition of Jesus’ life. (We know Paul's letters preceded the Gospels, and perhaps Paul besides on the road to Damascus,  may have seen Jesus only once, on the cross.) In his own letters Paul spoke of “the tradition handed down by others” implying the Apostles and unnamed others. He quotes early hymns that are basic creeds of belief. (In the early church, hymns were a formal liturgy somewhat like creeds, see Philippians 2:5-11, for example.) Here in Romans 12 Paul preaches righteousness by quoting this handed-down tradition:

14  Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 

15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 

16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. 

17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 

18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 

19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 

20 No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”

 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals.

Now listen to these verses from elsewhere in the NT:

 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

These are the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3-12. Do you hear the similarity?

How can I put this righteousness that is reckoned to us into a real-life situation that illuminates both Paul’s exhortations for active obedience and acknowledgement that we live under the burden of sin?

I usually avoid preaching about most current events because many of the controversies either defy simple solution, all the facts are not in, or proper words are so hard to find that every discussion seems to cause disunity and do an injustice to Christian compassion. But Paul says righteous peace demands we trust our fellow Christians and try to find peace and justice in the world. As I have struggled with Paul in Romans (Paul and I are not always on good speaking terms) Chapter 12 seems to point to the whole tragedy of Trevon Martin and George Zimmerman. Virtually all my pastor-friends have discussed it in a sermon, or are about to do so. Some are liberal, some are conservative. I’ve heard some TV evangelists preach flippantly about it and that really pains and embarrasses me for our church.  This affair is a tragedy in the purest sense of the word. It is the story of a sorrowful, heroic struggle with sin that leaves no winners and the downfall of two men. It is a tragedy that begs for a Christian perspective on righteousness.

We have one young African-American teenager who was unarmed, except for a bag of skittles, walking in a neighborhood at night in the rain with his hood pulled up apparently heading to a relative’s home.  Maybe he is angry, hot-headed and tired of being harassed by white folks and treated with suspicion because of the color of his skin. Maybe he was paranoid he was going to be robbed, or carried a grudge against “white folks.” We will never know except we know his possible history with drugs did not cause it. Perhaps stereotypes, his anger and real experience  (there had been break-ins in the neighborhood) had occurred the transformed him into a threatening presence to Mr. Zimmerman in the night rain. We will never know.

We have an older young Caucasian/Hispanic man who by public account wants to be a policeman, seems to be preoccupied with judging right and wrong, is frustrated some have "gotten away," carries suspicion and aggression in his heart and a gun on his belt rather mercy and peacemaking.  We had two persons with just the “right” mix of complementary weaknesses meet that night to create a tragic disaster.  

And disaster is exactly what happened. The young unarmed man is dead. The older man will likely be haunted by the burden of the young man’s death because the whole affair was avoidable. If both Mr. Martin and Zimmerman had lived peaceably, as Paul says, “as far as it depended on each of them,” if Mr. Zimmerman as Paul said, had “left space for the vengeance of God” were it needed and had lived in harmony with the world; “not being haughty, but associating with the lowly; and not claiming to be wiser than others;” if Mr. Martin had lived by the exhortation of Paul and Jesus, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them, and do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all,” then I am confident Mr. Martin would be alive, and Mr. Zimmerman would not carry the unnecessary death of another person on his conscience.

I can say the latter with some confidence that death will haunt Mr. Zimmerman if he is a compassionate Christian. I’ve met others in that situation. Recently I sat next to a young man who has just gotten out of jail. Homeless and with no job, he has just arranged to move to a church sponsored organization to get his life together. We are driving him to his probation officer Monday to obtain all the paperwork to make it happen. He told me this about killing. He said his whole family was involved in the meth trade and he was addicted by the time he was 12. He said, “I did a very, very bad thing when I was 13 years old.  My stepfather was a bad man and meth made him especially abusive. One day he was beating up my mother so badly that I got a gun and killed him.”  He spent his next years in juvenile detention because of it.

This is what makes his story relevant to Mr. Zimmerman. My young man said he resorted to even heavier drug abuse trying to blind his mind to the fact he had killed a man. He was arrested again for making and dealing drugs and sent to prison. His whole family is now either dead or in prison. He has  been clean for some time and is focussed on positive change. He realized drugs didn’t do anything but make him feel worse for what he had done. He said that no matter what, killing his stepfather will always haunt him. He said he can live with it only by his faith that gives him the hope of forgiveness.

His stepfather’s death was as unnecessary as Trevon Martin’s. Trevon Martin knows now the end of pain, but it is just beginning for Mr. Zimmerman. We can only pray he finds the path to the righteousness that this young man who killed his stepfather found. This is exactly the tragedy of sin that Paul is talking about. There is no winner but Satan in this affair.

We should never forget that the scriptures may speak of particular social and economic conditions and times gone by, but they are relevant today. The reality of Paul’s message is as important today as it ever was. Holding onto the zeal of Christ and never, ever forgetting to avoid thinking too highly of yourself at the expense of your neighbor is not a theoretical nicety but a consequence of righteousness and grace.  Paul, the Pharisee zealot answered Jesus’ question “Who is my neighbor?” The neighbor is the one who helped another due to active righteousness.  AMEN.

Day 222 - My Love/Hate Relationship with Paul

At the encouragement of a few members of our congregation I have undertaken to preach a few sermons based on Paul’s letter to the Romans. As a result, it seems necessary that I offer a few words about my task because frankly, Paul and I haven’t always had the best of a relationship. I suspect I am not alone in this boat. Whether you recognize it or not, neither have you, the reader. I offer this short reflection humbly only to stimulate your reconsideration of Paul and to point you towards some further reading.

Often it seems like I’ve been dragged into a Paul vs. Jesus moment, or drawn into a battle of proof texts where someone uses Paul, or one of his disputed letters, to prove a point of the role of women in worship, where homosexuality stands in the spectrum of sin, where his experience of “revelation” justifies a spiritual relativism, where people overwork his “faith without works” (especially Presbyterians) so that we lose sight of the evidentiary demonstration of faith by love of our neighbor, and as a basis to focus so tightly on a theology of punishing personal guilt.

But then I began to read Paul carefully, and to utilize some really insightful commentaries and books on Paul. I particularly point to the extended comments of James D. G. Dunn in the Word Biblical commentary; Paul J. Achtemeier’s commentary in Interpretation; Carl R. Holladay’s treatment of Romans (and the Pauline Letters) in A Critical Introduction to the New Testament;  Michael J. Gorman’s Reading Paul and a nice, short article by Peter L. Samuelson, A New Vision of Righteousness: Paul’s Exhortations in Romans 12-15 published in Word & World, (1990). (The latter influenced the path of this sermon series.) Last, but certainly most important was the good night’s sleep that let the Holy Spirit stir the pot chock full of those author’s reflections. When I wake up thinking about a subject I've struggled with, I usually find "something happened."

To begin, we cannot appreciate Paul’s "world view," much less his message about sin and the forces of culture that oppose Christian activity of the believer without understanding that Paul, a gentile Jew is a Hebrew’s Hebrew. From his earliest childhood he was steeped in Greek culture and Judaism until it became his intrinsic nature. He was educated a Pharisee in Jerusalem. We must never forget Pharisees were zealots who pursued and defended the purity of Judaism. He was full of zeal, it fueled his early pursuit and persecution of Christians as Jewish heretics. It remains a fire in him as he pursued Gentiles (and perhaps Jews of the Diaspora) to proclaim the new message of Christ.  We need to put aside our modern (negative) understanding of zealotry and the whole line of thinking best represented by Barry Goldwater's famous comment, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Zealotry to Paul is not fanaticism about politics, persecution or religion, it is the pursuit of a pure and true commitment to being part of the body of Christ.

We must understand that for Paul, every committed Christian with priorities in order is a zealot in pursuit of proclamation, peace and purity and love of humankind for Christ's sake. Conflict within the church is anathema to Christ and also to Paul because the congregation is the body of Christ, both corporately and personally. Anything that presents to the world an adverse view of a Christian is a sin. Hence we have an obligation to "walk the talk."

The transformation of a Pharisee zealot  to a Christian evangelist is a powerful, if not rationally inexplicable transformation.  It requires a total “reset” of Paul’s theology that brought all people into God’s fold, yet does not abandon the covenant between God and the Jew. This can only happen through the covenant with Abraham, the father of all nations. For Paul, his agony was that his own people, even Jewish Christians, were predominately resistant to that covenant and persecuted him.

Paul clearly forces us to come to terms with the meaning of revelation of the Holy Spirit, but he leaves the subject a little unsettled. On one hand we are expected to embrace the reality of his confrontation with Jesus on the Road to Damascus as a Divine experience. There are no witnesses or testimony about it but his.  Yet we must also embrace his felt need to gain validation of this revelation-inspired ministry by the Apostles in Jerusalem.  

Paul’s reliance on handed down tradition of Christianity is also an always conveniently ignored though obvious issue. There were no written Gospels during Paul’s time. Most if not all his letters predate the four Gospels. Yet when one reads Romans 12 and hears the Sermon on the Mount ringing in the background, we cannot escape the fact that Paul was exposed in his fourteen years in the desert in Arabia and Syria to the fundamental oral tradition that preserved the essential elements of the life of Jesus. Paul is intimately aware of the recalled words of Jesus. (Was he in the crowd at the crucifixion?)

To read Paul's letters faithfully, like any scripture, requires prayerful thought and spiritual guidance. I pray that I am doing Christ and Paul justice in my next three sermons. They will be (working titles):

1. “Do not think too highly of yourself,” a reflection on Romans 12:1-21 that addresses the role of Christian community.

2. “Subjection to Authority,” a reflection on Romans 13:1-10 on why neither the leader or the citizen should sleep easy.

3. “Hospitality,” a reflection on the Honored Guest, or why the congregation keeps its doors unlocked, ” based on Romans 14:5-9

Grace and Peace,

Henry

Day 216 - Neighborly Compassion

A Sermon given at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN July 14, 2013

readings: Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10: 25-37

Have you ever started into a discussion with someone knowing it was going to end up in an argument and hard feelings?  I had two fellows working for me once. One was a lay holiness preacher up near Dunlap and the other was a young fellow who was a Seventh Day Adventist.  Now I admired this fellow’s commitment. Taking on the commitment a layperson makes to take on preaching and pastoral duties.  It is a big and responsible job. This preacher imagined that he knew his bible pretty well. He seldom let us forget it. He also thought he knew Seventh Day Adventists pretty well. He knew they do not celebrate Easter Sunday and Christmas as most Protestants do. The young Seventh Day Adventist was overly sensitive and defensive of his religious heritage. It was a situation ripe for conflict.

The preacher concluded that because Adventists do not celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday or the birth of Christ on December 25, they are heretics and the work of the devil. He would constantly raise this accusation to the young employee. It always ended up in hard feelings and argument until I was forced to step in and stop it.

The preacher would never acknowledge that Seventh DayAdventists follow a very basic idea of Christian worship and what the church should be. They seeks to follow what they believe are the traditions of the earliest Christian congregations. They believe in the resurrection but know that the day of resurrection Sunday was instituted rather arbitrarily in the 4^th and 5^th century and given the name Easter in the 8^th century in what is now England. Eostre is the name of the fertility goddess of spring in pagan Germanic and Anglo-Saxon religious lore. Although that pagan celebration had died out, the name Easter stuck for the weeklong celebration of the Anglo-Saxon Christian church. Seventh Day Adventists believe that celebration distorts the true meaning of the Resurrection. The same logic applies to how Seventh Day Adventists acknowledge Jesus was born. They maintain we really have no idea exactly when Jesus was born; thus it does not make sense to celebrate it on an artificially contrived date. (Although a local church or some of its members may celebrate it on Dec. 25.) My preacher-employee refused to acknowledge or realize that Seventh Day Adventists do in fact acknowledge the resurrection and birth of Jesus. He could only see that their practice differed dramatically from his and that religiously justified his self-appointed duty to taunt and trip up this young Adventist.

This is basically what the Jewish lawyer was trying to do with Jesus concerning the question of how one attains eternal life. He knows Jesus violates the Law, he healed people on the Sabbath, he said you could ignore the dietary laws. The lawyer was a respected, highly educated man or priest who spends many hours a day studying the Torah and coming up with interpretations of the Law to guide persons’ response to particular events. He knew the people spoke of Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, and that Jesus regularly criticized the priesthood for its focus on the Law rather than repentance; and His job is to reduce Jesus’ claims to heresy.

We also have to remember there was an ongoing not-to-friendly religious argument about the reality of the resurrection between the Pharisees who were lay enforcers of Judaism and believed in resurrection of the body as eternal life and the Sadducees who were of the ancient priestly class and denied eternal life except as the continued existence of Judah, the Jewish state and its people. So Jesus words may also address this religious conflict.

Most of us are familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan and the earlier exchange on eternal life between Jesus and the lawyer. I could talk about several messages in this text, but I want to focus on two basic points.

The first point: When the scholar asked Jesus about eternal life he sought to place literal and rigid adherence to the Law as the path to it. Jesus in his effective way refutes this position with a question, “What does the Law say?”

The lawyer said adhering to the Shema, Love God, is the path; but he did not want to be caught ignoring the remaining commandments so he encircled the first commandment with the last, “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The lawyer offered a neatly closed logical argument: “If God created humanity and the universe and pronounced that creation good, and if God promised his steadfast love in his covenant with the Hebrews, then the Hebrew is bound to reciprocate the ultimate Love of God by loving his fellow Jew as God loves both him and his neighbor. The only way to love God fully is to love your Jewish neighbor fully.”  Jesus has set the hook. He acknowledges the truth of the scholar’s remark and that causes the scholar to push the issue one further question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus then uses this parable to lead the scholar to an unwelcome conclusion; namely, the neighbor is the one who has compassion for others.

Jesus makes his point with the example of the two religious figures and Samaritan who encounter a man on the side of the road robbed and perhaps beaten to death. The two religious figures go out of the way (cross the road to the other side) to avoid the man. Numerous rabbinical interpretations of the Law teach if one of these Jewish priests gets involved with this injured man whether he is dead or simply bleeding, they are required to undergo an extensive purification process before they can enter the temple and participate in worship. If they find out the person is not a Jew then they also face purification rituals if they touch the person.  In their rigid view, neither violated the Law as they understood it by avoiding the victim, in fact they followed the purity laws to the letter. However Jesus is pointing out that following part of the law rigidly caused them to ignore the other essential part of the law about neighborly love. Point one by Jesus: salvation requires neighborly love.

This brings me to the second point. The Jewish scholar might jump in here and say, wait a minute, this Samaritan that stopped to help, he isn’t a Jew so there is nothing to stop him, he isn’t going to the temple or is bound by the Law. We are supposed to Love God as God loves us Jews, but what is the rule for strangers?  Love your neighbor as God loves your neighbor?  Love your neighbor as you love yourself? This fellow is not a Jew.

The answer is bound up in the Greek word “compassion” used to describe the emotion felt by the Samaritan. Depending on the specific translation you will find other words such as  “had pity on” or “felt sorry for.” This is another case where translations fail. This Greek word for feeling compassion has a special meaning. It is the compassion that comes from the most deep-seated sense of passion that invokes the kind of emotional power of grief over the death of a loved one or a loved one’s child. It could be translated as “heart-wrenching” or “gut-wrenching” compassion. In the entire Gospel the word is used only nine times. Seven of those describe the response of Jesus to a person in destitute helplessness. This clearly shows the word means “Godly compassion” - the compassion God offers us through the gift of his Son.

It is the compassion of Jesus described in Matthew 14 and Mark 6 in the evening when in the evening he looked over the 5,000 ill and hungry people who followed him around the Sea of Galilee to hear his words and be healed. Jesus healed and fed them. It is the compassion of Jesus described in Matt 15 and Mark 8 when he looked over another crowd of 4,000 lame, maimed, mute, blind and hopeless people seeking healing. Jesus fed them.  In Matt 18, it is the feeling of the King of Heaven when he decided to call his debtors to make good their debt to him. If unable to repay he would have all their possessions, the slave and family sold into slavery to recover what he could. But the slave wit the greatest debt at his feet begging for mercy. The king had compassion and forgave the debts. In Matt 20, it is the compassion that led Jesus to heal the two blind men before he entered Jerusalem for his passion.  Or the time in Mark 1 when he healed a leper. It is the compassion that caused Jesus to raise from the dead the only son of a poor widow in Luke 7.  It is the compassion begged from Jesus by the father of the epileptic son in Mark 9.

Jesus’ point is inescapable compassion and neighbors are tightly bound.  The degree of compassion that neighborly love requires is exceedingly large and applies to strangers. But Jesus asks the question, “Who was the neighbor?” The answer the lawyer gave to Jesus reveals a very subtle and important twist.

The neighbor is the one who helps, not the one who is helped. We know this already because we use “neighbor” the way Jesus teaches. You’ve heard the saying “That is very neighborly of you.”  Being neighborly does not imply the person who lives next door, it describes how should treat the person next door.

We know Jesus saw the Law not as a set of rigidly interpreted and applied rules that bound a Jew to a behavior but rather as a way of living that set the Jew apart from the rest of the world.  As such, Jesus showed the Law is tempered with compassion. It was better to heal a person on the Sabbath rather than let the person suffer until Sunday. The law is not a rigid straight jacket binding the Jew to a set of activities that leads to salvation. It is a guide to a way of living by a chosen race that honors every person as God’s creation regardless of any other consideration such as nationality or religious orientation.

So how do these two points about the Law and compassion relate to my example of the holiness preacher and the young Seventh Day Adventist?

Jesus equates the questions, “Who is the neighbor?” and “What is neighborly love?”  We asked our Vacation Bible School students “who is your neighbor,” and we got the answer we expected, “everybody.” That is a perfectly true statement and a good place to start. We see in Jesus’ parable that neither being a Samaritan or a Jew is important to compassionate action.

We do have this problem of Jew and Samaritan. The closest I can come to describing the relationship between them might be the way we are tempted to compare Christians and Muslims given the trade center bombing, the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the brutality of ultra-conservative Islam in the middle East and Africa and persecution of Christians there. Jews loathed Samaritans because they are the remnant of the ten renegade tribes of Israel that broke and established their own heretical traditions.

The wise biblical reader of today cannot escape the radical implication of Jesus’ parable that all people merit compassion. But I’m interested in what it means at the practical level of my holiness preacher and Seventh Day Adventist, and us here today.  Compassion does not demand we stop before we act and ask if the person before us is right or wrong, or one of us or not.  The neighborly compassion that Jesus expects is to love your neighbor enough to put aside disagreement and find harmonious solutions.

It is said that the greatest barrier to compromise is not fear of losing an argument but fear of injured pride or losing something of small value. That something lost is often ego, or living with a decision that bruises our own sense of justice though it may not actually impact us, or God’s justice in the world.

I’m not sure any of us really exercise enough compassion to really forgive. We often forget that we are not called to judge and condemn; we are not called to hate; we are not called even to argue, we are called to bring to our fellows the heart-felt, gut-wrenching compassion God feels for his creation that caused him to give his Son for us.  If my preacher and Seventh Day Adventist had understood that, both would have been much happier and effective at work and worship.

I have said our history is a vocation to act as Christians; not to judge but to love our fellow as compassionately as God loves us. All God’s children are our fellows, whether the person in the pew near us, or the person on the street whose ideas about faith clash with ours. Neighborly compassion is a hard job because opinions and feelings get in the way, but when we get it right, folks listen and notice. There is no greater feeling and reward than God’s blessing of us for it. AMEN.